Memory, Women, and Community: Turkey

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Memory, Women, and Community: Turkey
The relations between memory, gender, and nationstate formation in Turkey can be best captured if
their multiplicity is drawn out. This necessarily
involves discussing the construction of gendered
memories by the early republican elite in comparison with those produced by their “daughters” and
looking at contemporary articulations of nostalgia
in the identity formulation of different groups.
During the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the state emphasized a qualified Westernization
with the aim of undercutting collective loyalties to
the Ottoman legacy. This effort was coupled with a
unique form of secularism based on a distinction
between the “right” and “wrong” Islams – the latter being an umbrella term for any religious activity
that had the potential to challenge the legitimacy of
the new regime. In creating a collective memory
to consolidate and justify the republican pillars,
images of women would be indispensable tropes.
Ziya Gökalp, the most significant intellectual of
the period, provided the framework of the new
Turkish national identity with a pre-Islamic past
whereby desired elements of modernization could
be Turkified. His theory centralized women as the
guardians and transmitters of this pure Turkish
civilization, which had characteristics such as gender equality, feminism, and monogamous families
(Durakbaça 1998). As a result, the new collective
identity was based on a particular remembrance of
the pre-Ottoman past in which gendered subjectivities played a significant role in coalescing the
“indigenous” and the “foreign.”
Whereas the bigotry of the Ottoman period and
heretic religious practices were said to victimize
women, the republican ideals and “correct” Islam
were seen as sources of moral principles and modesty requirements. Hence, the Woman Question
became the pivotal component of the Kemalist
project with the image of the modern women symbolizing the break with the past (Kandiyoti 1991).
The mainstream historical writing described the
enlightened male elites as the pioneers of this
change – concealing the suppression of women’s
autonomous movements (Tekeli 1990). The discourse also distinguished between Istanbul women
(among whom such movements had originated)
and peasant women. While peasant women’s efforts
during the war were glorified, “Istanbul women”
were seen as betrayers who entertained the enemy
(Toska 1998). This gendered differentiation also
served the purpose of alienating Istanbul, whose
inhabitants were regarded as suspect because of the
past political importance of the city.
Another remarkable aspect of this contrast is the
way minorities are constructed in popular memory.
The close relationship between Turkish nationalism
and Turkish ethnicity is reflected in the establishment literature where non-Muslim women were
depicted as morally loose, creating an other against
which the morality of the “true” Turkish woman
could be checked. Reinforcement of ideals of Turkish womanhood vis-à-vis the decreasing visibility of
“betraying” women may have also served as a way
of erasing the forced and, in many ways, brutal
transformation of a heterogeneous society into one
that was predominantly Turkish and Muslim. By
the same token, the rejection of the Kurds as a
minority and their redefinition in terms of religious
heresy and regional backwardness find their parallel in literature and memoirs depicting the need to
educate women victimized by lack of language
skills and modern education (Türkyılmaz 2001).
Until recently, the success of such formulations
was reflected in the ways “daughters of the republic” embraced this identity and advocated the
nationalist project. Numerous memoirs, biographies, and oral history projects focusing on female
witnesses of the early republican era reveal how
women from urban, middle- and upper-middleclass families participated in the consolidation of
this story (Ilyaso(lu 2000, Tekeli 1988). These elite
women tended to narrate their life stories in an epic
fashion resembling the historical telling of the
founding of the nation, complicating the demarcation between official history and authenticity of life
experience. They defined their existential meanings
around their biological or spiritual fathers and
defended the militarist and elitist tendencies of the
republic (Altınay 2000).
Another common thread in these recollections is
nostalgia, which is shaped around the contrast
between the past and the present. This partly stems
from the relatively recent emergence of challenges
to the Kemalist visions of these women and from
mainstream historical writing (Z. Arat 2000). For
instance, in the Islamist construction of the republican history, the equity between modernization
and secularization is questioned. At the forefront of
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memory, women, and community: turkey
this challenge are urban, educated women who
enter the public sphere donning the ™ijàb (Göle
1996). The new feminist groups also question the
thankful attitude of the earlier generations and suggest alternative readings of history and collective
memory through which they demand a more comprehensive women’s liberation (Y. Arat 2000,
Tekeli 1998).
As a result, in Turkey, as in many Third-World
nation-state formations, images of women along
with the actual participation of particular groups
of women in the public sphere have played indispensable parts in shaping and reshaping collective
memories.
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Özlem Altan
KEY WORDS: National identity, Collective identity,
History and self-fashioning, Multiple gendered histories